Etailers - What To Use Twitter For

By Steve Poland   •   May 22, 2008

Attention Etailers: Here are some simple/quick ideas for how to use Twitter and increase sales…

  1. Why not post a new Twitter “tweet” every 30 mins or 60 mins, posting the hottest selling item of the hour? Or which item(s) are trending with number of views, or number of sales?
  2. Why not post a deal every hour? “This hour’s deal — Sony Digital Camera for $69! While Supplies Last - 10 available”. Woot is huge and fun — it’s an addiciton — you never know what they are going to post and they are usually great deals. So clear out your excess inventory or clearance items with vast discounts on some things — heck, don’t even make a profit on the items you post here — because you’ll start getting new customers, as word of mouth start telling their friends about these crazy hourly deals you have going on. And really, how hard is it to have a coupon/discount code created ‘on the fly’ each hour [or have the whole week planned, but only allow the coupons to work for 1-hour]?
  3. Post favorable feedback testimonials from customers — and/or reviews they just posted to your website about a product; …START A CONVERSATION!
  4. Post a daily tip, and/or article related to your niche.

Everything I’ve mentioned above could simply be done with a free Wordpress blog, which you can time when the items will post to your blog [change the date/time stamp]. And then use the Twitter plugin for Wordpress that will auto-publish your blog posts to your Twitter account.




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Comments

2 Responses to “Etailers - What To Use Twitter For”

  1. MyAvatars 0.2 Jeff Raab on June 4th, 2008 10:34 am (perm link)

    Trying to get car dealers to do this now…

  2. MyAvatars 0.2 guess_who on June 11th, 2008 4:52 pm (perm link)

    I’m sorry for being a bit late on this post, but Zappos has been doing a lot on twitter. Even have their own twitter page for following employees and others talk about zappos. twitter.zappos.com

    The CEO uses it for promotions and such as well.

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